


From Russia With Love

by thatbluenote



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Gen, More characters to be added, punisher season 3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-11-30
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:37:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21611014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatbluenote/pseuds/thatbluenote
Summary: Welcome to Season 3 of The Punisher.The Russian is coming for Frank, if Frank's lifestyle doesn't kill him first.Redemption. Who are we, if not called to account?Revenge. Who are we, if not human?Revolution. Who are we, if not ourselves?Does one hate for all time? Does one rage forever?(Jeremiah 3:5)
Relationships: Amy Bendix & Frank Castle, Frank Castle & Curtis Hoyle, Frank Castle & David "Micro" Lieberman, Frank Castle & Dinah Midani, Frank Castle/Karen Page
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37





	From Russia With Love

His bootlace snaps in the stairwell.  _ Flip,  _ slap. The boot drags, loose. He keeps climbing. All the way up forty-eight stairs and eight landings to the fourth floor.  _ Flip _ -slap.  _ Flip- _ slap. Every other step.

Three guns in the holdall over his shoulder. A black duffel heavy with ammo clips in each hand. A piece in his waistband, bowie holstered at his ankle. Flip- _ slap _ .  _ Flip- _ slap. 

No one cares if he walks in like this. The stairwell is a no-man’s land, echoing, green fluorescents and patchy paint. His noisy, useless boot is drowned out by the sound of the metal rattling, however. Enough bullets in the duffels and his pockets to sing like he’s loaded with change. 

_ One batch, two batch, penny and dime.  _

Keep walking, Frankie. It ain’t no crime.

Outside his door waits a quart-sized container, worn and washed free of its yogurt logo long ago, and wrapped in a threadbare Snoopy hand towel. His apartment, apartment 4C, rents for cash with no questions asked and no security cameras in the building, but it also comes with Joan the Mouse. 

Reclusive, secretive Joan Moskovitz. She lives in 4B, right across the hall from Frank. He’s only seen her twice outside her apartment -- tight, worried grimace, long salt-and-pepper braids, eyes wide as dinner plates, scurrying away from the first-floor mailboxes like a scared mouse, nose twitching.

Joan somehow keeps an eye on him, despite her intense shyness. Somehow she knows his comings and goings well enough to leave him soup on some of his worst nights. Does she know he lost a molar in a fight last month, too? He wonders. Lately the soups have been a lot softer.

This one’s still hot.

He shoves his bags through the door ahead of him, dumps their weight down carefully despite his screaming muscles, and leans down to pick up the container. Cheddar potato soup wafts to his nose, smoky with kielbasa. His stomach growls.

Light flickers behind the fisheye of 4B, a rare sign of acknowledgment, and he nods his thanks toward the silent door. He stopped trying to thank her in person months ago, realizing she was never going to answer the door.

Inside, he takes off the offending pair of boots, grunting with effort, and after a second, he strips off the filthy socks too, dumping them onto the floor with a wet  _ plop _ . 

Somewhere in his godforsaken kitchen is a spoon.  _ Keep going, Frankie _ .  _ Not yet.  _ He reaches instead for a length of gauze, wrapping around one foot. It’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do.

He grunts as he shoves his feet into a pair of worn motorcycle boots. Grabs a bucket. Fills it with hot water to dilute the bleach he grabs from under the kitchen sink. He grabs a pile of rags and leaves the soup on the counter, carefully wrapped in its Snoopy towel.

Then he climbs back down all forty-eight stairs and eight landings, and he cleans up every bloody, dripping footprint that he’d left behind, until there is no trace of him left in the stairwell, just the faint lemony-chlorine burn of the bleach singeing his nostrils.

Then, and only then, does he climb up the many stairs, slowly, to eat his soup.

It’s morning. It’s sunshine and chilly blue skies. It’s Karen banging on his door for the fourth time this week. 

It’s not the problem he wants to have after barely five hours of sleep. He would have ignored it, like the first three times she came by, but he can hear her cursing him from the hall.

His foot throbs like a motherfucker when he stumps down the hall to eyeball her through the fisheye and then open the door a crack. Not far enough for her to see his bandaged foot. “What do you want?”

“Goddamnit, Frank. I  _ knew  _ you were here. Why aren’t you answering your phone? Can we please talk?” 

She’s still mad. It’s better this way.

“Nothin’ to talk about.” 

The flash of anger in her eyes unsettles him. “Not about  _ that _ ...will you let me in, please? This is important. It’s about Amy.”

That shocks him for a second, yet he still hesitates. He could tell her to wait outside while he cleans up; he could tell her to meet him at the diner. Hell, he could be an asshole and ask her to explain while they stand in the doorway — but maybe this is exactly what she needs to see right now. With a tired sweep of his arm, Frank swings the door wide open for her and she steps inside.

She still smells like flowers when she passes him; a bittersweet reminder. Close enough to touch, but utterly untouchable.  _ It’s better this way _ .

Karen eyes the black duffels in the hall and steps over the blood-stained heap of his wrecked boots and socks that he still hasn’t cleaned up. She edges toward his cramped living room. He’s more aware, now, that it stinks a little. Too late to do anything about that, he grimaces. Too late to do anything about what happened between them, either, though she’s not here about that.

Karen sits on his couch exactly as she has a million times before, ignoring the ballistic crates and boxes of ammunition, fixing him with a weary look. “I thought you should know Amy has a warrant out for her arrest. More than one, actually.”

He considers this, wondering why he’s even surprised that Karen has kept an eye on Amy from afar. He scrubs the last of the sleep from his eyes with one hand. 

“Appreciate you letting me know.” He stops, considers, with a fond smile. “She’s better at staying under the radar than she used to be. If not, well...she’ll call if she needs bail money—”

“That’s the thing,” Karen interrupts, a line of worry creasing her forehead. “She’s got a warrant in Florida. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except they tracked her down in Virginia.” Her lips press together. “Because she was arrested for theft and then skipped out on her bail.” She brushes back her hair and then rearranges her hands in her lap, fidgeting. He tries to ignore the urge to comfort her. She doesn’t like it when he does that. Not anymore.

“I assume she’s heading here,” Karen continues, “but it’s not safe. Florida sent a bulletin to the NYPD since she used to live in the area. Her Florida mugshot is now pinned up in every precinct in town.” When he doesn’t reply, she shifts forward in her seat, that little accusatory wrinkle appearing above one eyebrow. “I’ve already had two cops ask me if I’ve seen her around town. Insinuating that I know where she is. Frank, I can’t have this coming back to me, and I’m sure you don’t want her leading the cops right to you.” 

Frank’s foot throbs from where he cut it last night and he shifts his weight. Karen glances at the bandage, then up at him again, her blue eyes clear as day. The old argument hangs in the air between them, stale as week-old bagels.  _ You’re going to get yourself killed, Frank. If I have to watch you walk out that door with your guns one more time not knowing if you’re going to come back, Frank, I swear to god I’ll lose it. Frank? Are you listening to me? _

Frank cannot make himself what he is not.

_ Are you listening to me? _

He was. Even though he didn’t want to hear the sound of Karen’s heart breaking, he heard it, over and over. It was over between them before it began. 

It’s better this way, he reminds himself. Still, the way her eyes shine with purpose and the way her hair practically glows in his shitty little apartment doesn’t make it any easier. On his good nights, when he’s not drowning in nightmares, Frank’s dreams are kaleidoscopic with glimpses of Karen. Always Karen. Cradled close and fragile, or sometimes searing him with her touch. It all fades to nothing in the daytime, remembering the disagreements that led to shouting matches. The dreams are merely a mocking vision of something he cannot possess. The dreams feel so real, though. Some days he wakes with the memory clutched in his chest like the breath has been beaten out of him, afraid everything will shatter under his fingers like a bubble of glass.

“Are you listening to me? Amy’s in trouble, Frank.”

He musters his attention, thinking it through. “When was she in Virginia?”

“Day before yesterday. NYPD got the APB about her last night.”

Frank grunts with undisguised frustration. He’d hoped to have more time to do this right. “I gotta go,” he says, pulling out a pair of boots. “I owe you.”

When Karen leaves, she lingers for a second at the door, eyeing the rust-brown blood drying on the floor. “Frank, just don’t—” she sighs. “Don’t let her get too caught up in this.”

He pauses, looking to her worried expression.

“Your life, I mean,” Karen says. “She got out once. Don’t let her get dragged back in.”

Is she talking about herself, or the kid? Frank wonders.

“She’s a big girl. She got herself in and out of plenty of scrapes without my help.” When he sees Karen pause, a pained look on her face as if maybe she wants to say something else, he takes the opportunity to stride toward the door, ushering her out. 

It’s the idea of Karen getting dragged back in that settles in his gut like a stone. Not that he’d ever admit that, of course.

*

It takes him less than five minutes casing Amy’s old neighborhood to glimpse the two unmarked cop cars patrolling slow around the block, pausing at intervals. He waits, watches, but doesn’t see anything, even when he scales the fire escape in an alley to check a third-floor apartment where he knows her friend used to live. 

By lunchtime, his stomach growls at him as he idles in the van. His foot is still throbbing in his boot, a bad reminder of last night’s operation that had gone awry. Lately, it seems like he’s always fighting the same gangs, the same Eastern European thugs running the same deals, breaking up the same corrupt operations, identical cheap weapons, identically muscled men with identically bad ideas about how to make money and fuck over the rest of the world. 

Frank’s getting tired. He doesn’t like admitting it, but the Punisher life is starting to get to him.

He’s glad when Curtis’s name lights up his phone with a text.  _ Amy is here at the support group meeting with me. She called me from Penn Station. Think you should stop by. _

Frank shakes his head. Puts his van in gear and heads up to the church to meet them. It bothers him that she didn’t call him first. Maybe the dream of Florida was too good to be true, he muses. Maybe things are worse than he thought. Like everything else, things fall apart.

He just has to keep it together.

**Author's Note:**

> Drop me a comment, loves <3


End file.
